Museum of the Moving Image welcomes Pac-Mondrian and nine other innovative digital games to an upgraded version of Digital Play, the Museum’s interactive exhibition of video games and game-based art.

Digital Play: Reloaded opens on Friday, March 18, 2005, with appearances and a 7:00 p.m. performance by the makers of Pac-Mondrian, a video “artcade” game created by the Toronto-based art collective Prize Budget for Boys. The exhibition will be shown in the Museum’s William Fox Gallery, where all of the games and installations can be played by visitors. Digital Play Reloaded will be open to the public on weekends through May 30, 2005.

Pac-Mondrian is an irreverent fusion of video games and fine art, as Toru Iwatani’s iconic yellow sphere munches his way through Piet Mondrian's modernist artwork Broadway Boogie Woogie. This will be the first and only showing of Pac-Mondrian in the United States. Pac-Mondrian will be shown alongside the original arcade game Ms. Pac-Man (1981).

Other new installations in Digital Play: Reloaded include Arcadia (2004), an arcade-style PC game from the independent game studio Gamelab, which challenges audiences to play four arcade-style video games at one time; the absurd and engaging Japanese game Katamari Damacy which, roughly translated, means “soul of clump,” and refers to a rolling ball of detritus controlled by the player; and Stepmania, an independently created, open-source version of the arcade dance game phenomenon, Dance Dance Revolution. Unlike its commercial counterpart, Stepmania incorporates audiences’ music collections and dance patterns, which are shared online.

The addition of video game-based art adds a new, provocative twist to the Museum’s existing Digital Play exhibition, which is organized around the theme of action in its different uses and interpretations. Music-, dance-, and movement-oriented video games originating in Japan constitute a shift from traditional, often violent game scenarios. Classic arcade games from the 1980s are paired with current home-based games to contrast their approaches to such action-related topics as driving and waging battle on land and in space. Though the graphics have changed significantly, patterns of play remain similar.